The World Cyber Games (WCG) was an international e-sports event (or "Cyber Games Festival") operated by Korean company World Cyber Games Inc. and backed by Samsung Electronics and, since 2006, Microsoft Corporation. The official motto of WCG is "Beyond the Game", which is also the title of a documentary focusing on a legendary WCG rivalry. The World Cyber Games were set up in 2000 with the first festival being held in 2001. The festival is influenced by the Olympic Games with a players village for competitors and since 2004 a different host city every year.

The goal behind WCG is simple: it aims to be the Olympics of e-sports. For the past 10 years WCG has held qualifiers for a myriad of games, including Warcraft III, Counterstrike, Fifa and StarCraft: Brood War, across most countries via national qualification tournaments handled by smaller organizations. For a complete list of which games have been played during the various World Cyber Games, go here.

Whereas competition is always a great aspect to the game, and WCG being on an epic international scale is quite impressive, the greatest importance to WCG is the merging of different communities and countries together for the purpose of the forementioned competition. Not only do players from say the Warcraft community get to meet and share with the StarCraft community, but on a much subtler level, Koreans get to meet with "Foreigners", and even Americans get to meet with South Americans, or the Polish with the Germans.

The format of the WCG is that each country has a national qualifier where the top-placed players get sent to the group stage of WCG. There they participate in a tournament where the top 16 or 32 (depending on the WCG) qualify. Eventually the players have been reduced to just two whom then face each other in the Final. There is also a match for the 3rd place.

The Pan American Champion Ship is another project of the WCG and follows the idea to provide a competition for the American players. Although offering a reasonable prize pools the media attention was very limited.